In The News

Gamification: How Competition Is Reinventing Business, Marketing & Everyday Life

Written byJennifer Van Grove, MashablePublished:
July 28, 2011

Can life, and all the menial or routine tasks that come with it, be transformed through game mechanics into an engaging, social and fun recreational activity? Such is the idea behind the emerging trend of “gamification.”

Gamification is most often defined as the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications. The term also suggests the process of using game thinking to solve problems and engage audiences.

The word “gamification,” much like the phrase “social media” a few years back, is being lobbed around in technology circles as the next frontier in web and mobile. Just as nearly every application, website, brand and marketer now employs social media in some capacity, so too will these entities gravitate toward game mechanics in the years ahead.

A recent Gartner report from April of this year suggests as much. Analysts predict that by 2015, more than 50% of organizations will gamify their innovation processes.

“By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application,” the Gartner report concludes.

Here we take a deeper look at the term, the trend, the mechanics and the real world implications.

An Intro to the Gamification Trend

Gamification, as a concept, is far from a new idea.

“Companies have been using games in non-game context for a long time,” says Gabe Zichermann, the author of Game-Based Marketing and the CEO of Gamification.co.

Zichermann cites the military, Hollywood and the hospitality sector — think airline frequent flier programs and hotel loyalty clubs — as three key industries utilizing game mechanics prior to the “coming out party” of gamification in 2010.

“What’s changed over the past couple of years is the confluence of a few different factors,” he says. Zichermann, like many others, specifically points to the success of startups such as Foursquare and Zynga as instrumental in embedding the idea into techie consciousness.

The second, and perhaps more significant factor, says Zichermann, is that once long-standing marketing techniques are now failing. “They’re failing because people today are seeking more reward and more engagement from experiences than ever before,” he explains. “The younger generation — the millennial generation and younger — is more game-attuned than previous generations.”

Today’s youth mandates a more engaging experience, he argues. “Gamification is required to bring those things into balance, and to make things engaging enough so people will pay attention to them and stay focused on them for a longer period of time.”

The gamification trend is particularly hot in today’s world because, should we follow this line of thinking, younger entrepreneurs are building applications and services for younger audiences who demand these features.

SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch agrees. “It feels like the next natural evolution of human-technological interaction to me,” he says.”As we complete the social layer, we’ll begin construction in earnest on the game layer.”

The Mechanics

The five most commonly used game mechanics, as identified by Zichermann, are as follows:

Points: Points are everywhere, and they’re often used in non-game apps as a way to denote achievement. Points also measure the user’s achievements in relation to others and work to keep the user motivated for the next reward or level. They can even double as action-related currency. Health Month, for instance, uses points in an interesting fashion. The site asks users to set up weekly health-related goals and stick to them for an entire month. Each person starts with 10 “life points” and the goal is to end the month with at least 1 life point. The player loses a point every time he breaks a rule, but friends can help the player “heal” and earn back points.

Badges: While badges have their origins in the physical world, Foursquare popularized the digital variety with its oh-so-clever set of real-life merit badges that range from easy (Newbie badges are awarded to users on their first checkin) to nearly-impossible to unlock (it takes 10 movie theater checkins to earn the Zoetrope badge).

Levels: Zynga uses levels to make the seemingly mundane task of tending to crops all the more enticing, and LevelUp encourages mobile users to level up and get better discounts for becoming more loyal patrons.

Leaderboards: Leaderboards rank users and work to motivate and encourage them to become players. Foursquare started with city-centric leaderboards, but now places the emphasis on ranking users against their friends. Earn a few points for a checkin, and Foursquare will show you which of your friends you’ve flown by on the leaderboard.

Challenges: These range from the simple to complex and often involve communal activity or group play. Priebatsch gamified his South by Southwest Interactive keynote with a group challenge that required all attendees to work together in rows. A proffered $10,000 donation to the National Wildlife Foundation was used to sweeten the deal.

Game Design & Plug-and-Play Gamification Platforms

“At the start of any new market … you need to have these catalyzing technology platforms,” Zichermann says.

He’s speaking, of course, of gamification platform providers such as Bunchball, Badgeville and BigDoor. Businesses can use these platforms to add plug-and-play game mechanics to their websites and applications.

The platforms, in Zichermann’s eyes, bring a scalable technology solution to market that makes it easier for companies to participate in the gamification trend, and it allows them build and deploy products faster.

Priebatsch, however, is a bit uncertain of these platform providers. “This sub-set of the trend has always confused me a little bit,” he says. “I see a real difference between utilizing game mechanics to improve a core experience from the ground up, and what I call ‘bolt-on gamification,’ where you basically just tack a badge on to something and call it a day. That doesn’t really work in my opinion.”

The two do agree on the significance of game and product design. “[Platforms] don’t obviate the need for good design,” Zichermann says.

Game and product design, as Zichermann sees it, is an important science. Design, he argues, needs to be centered around the customer’s needs and wants and should determine the mechanics that companies use.

Nike+, says Zichermann, is an example of a brand properly merging design with mechanics, mostly because Nike is always iterating on the product, he says. “Gamification isn’t like doing an ad campaign — it requires ongoing maintenance.”

Recycle rewards company RecycleBank is getting it right on the design front as well, he says. “They’ve had tremendous success by designing really compelling and interesting gamified systems that people can interact with to recycle more,” he says. “They know their audience really well.”

Gamification & Real World Problems

Email overload, fitness phobia, diet and medication apathy. These are all real world problems and challenges that game mechanics can address.

Simple applications such as The Email Game and Health Month are meant to be stimulating and enjoyable tools to help people complete tasks they would otherwise dread.

“The game mechanics that I use are all about helping people feel less guilty about failure, since we’ve found that this is one of the primary obstacles to following through on a diet or fitness plan,” explains Health Month creator Buster Benson.

“Games are one area of life where failure isn’t taken personally. In games, failure is expected, and there’s always a way to play again,” he says. “Games help us appreciate the story of our failures and successes as an entertaining narrative rather than as a story about how you just aren’t good enough for this or that.”

Health Month users have been most responsive to the notion of being “healed” by friends when they lose their points. “By far, the most popular game mechanic is being able to ‘heal’ other players when they fall off the wagon,” he says. “Social forgiveness and camaraderie are fairly untapped game mechanics, and yet really powerful.”

One radical example of gamification in real life is changing the way people drive in Sweden.

Kevin Richardson came up with a genius idea to get drivers to slow down: The Speed Camera Lottery.

“One troubling observation is the obscene amount of energy that goes to the one bad driver who speeds. Police, courts, fines, traffic school, points (the bad kind), increased insurance, and on and on,” Richardson writes of the speed camera conundrum. “And where is the reward for people doing the right thing? What happened to that? Obeying the law is a pretty lonely endeavor.”

Eventually, Richardson’s thoughts materialized into an idea and he submitted the following to Volkswagon’s Fun Theory contest (see video above): “Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do? The idea here is capture on camera the people who keep to the speed limit. They would have their photos taken and registration numbers recorded and entered into a lottery. Winners would receive cash prizes and be notified by post. Better still, the winning pot would come from the people who were caught speeding.”

Richardson’s Speed Camera Lottery idea won the 2009/2010 challenge, and the idea has since been tested by the Swedish National Society for Road Safety in Stockholm. The result: A 22% reduction in driver speed in the first week after implementation.

“That’s game thinking at its purist form,” says Zichermann. “It gives people direction about what they should be doing in small, incremental positive ways.”

One has to wonder, can anything be gamified? “Everything can be made more engaging and more fun by using game techniques,” Zichermann argues.

Take cancer, a potentially awkward thing to gamify. “I don’t presume to think that we can make having cancer into a purely fun experience,” he says. “But, we have data to show that when we give cancer patients gamified experiences to help them manage their drug prescriptions and manage chemotherapy, they improve their emotional state and also their adherence to their protocol.”

“You cannot gamify anything,” Priebatsch says, taking a slightly different position. “Game mechanics can fix lots of problems and do lots of great things, but they are not a good fit for everything. Just like social is super powerful, but not a great fit for everything … everything has limitations and the beauty of both of these mega-trends is that they’re a great fit for more situations than not.”

The Gamified Apps & Services You Love

The gamification trend would not exist without you, the players of the world. So, I asked my Google+ followers to chime in on the topic with this question: “What mobile or web applications (or hardware/software setups) successfully use game mechanics to motivate you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do?”

The answers poured in. Here’s a sampling of the responses:

“Easy one: Foursquare :) by giving my position, you earn points to challenge friends, badges and Mayor titles of the place you rule!” – Julien Houdayer

“My Garmin 405 Watch motivates me to exercise — I run that last mile when I would otherwise stop.” – Adena DeMonte

“Run Keeper makes my bike rides 10x cooler than just doing them with out statistics. I’m always excited for my next ride because because I want to increase my top speed or lower my fastest mile. Huge motivating mechanics.” – Marcus Andrews

“Nikeplus.com has been a great motivator for me to run. The program provides positive feedback, challenges to enter in, and charts detailing my progress over past months. There is also a “leveling” component at the top of the screen where runners can advance from “orange” level to “blue” level and so on depending on how many miles a runner has recorded. The scheme reminds me of the karate student advancing from one belt to another, and provides both a sense of progression and accomplishment.” – Chris Cabe

“Pomodoro is a great ‘get things done’ application that uses game mechanics to reinforce using the Pomodoro Method. The Pomodoro Method involves working in 25 min. increments with a five minute break, followed by another 25/5. Repetition is the key, and the game mechanics work kind of like a dungeon crawler. It’s great.” – Kevin Bogle

“FitFun is an iPhone app that makes me get up throughout the work day in the office and do a push up or two.” – Aye Moah

“The Strava iPhone app definitely has me looking forward to hills on my bike rides. By allowing me to define sections of my ride as climbs and then keeping track of a leaderboard for fastest times up those sections, I not only have a gauge on my own fitness but also of what is possible. All without having to deal with club rides. Without the app, I don’t think I would even time myself on climbs.” – Rob Taylor

“Waze is addictive. I rarely use it for its intended purpose: navigation. Mostly I’m just tracking where I drive and keeping my rank up there. And a couple times I may have gone out of my way to do some road munching … ” – Jeff Hester